Bitcoin Hits New Milestone, Processes One Billion Transactions

The Bitcoin network has achieved a new milestone: one billion processed transactions, 15 years, four months, and four days after its genesis block was mined.

According to data on Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard, the one billionth transaction was mined into block 842,241 on May 5 at 9:34 pm UTC.

Bitcoin Process One Billion Transactions

Bitcoin’s latest milestone comes less than three weeks after the network completed its fourth halving, which cut miners’ block rewards from 6.25 bitcoin to 3.125 BTC. The halving occurred on April 19, when Bitcoin’s total transaction count hovered around 990.64 million.

The network has witnessed a significant rise in daily transactions in the past month, with the launch of new protocols like Ordinals, Runes, and the BRC-20 token standard.

The launch of Ordinals brought about Bitcoin non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that drove user activity on the network. At the time of writing, data from the market analysis platform Dune showed that roughly $432 million had been spent as transaction fees on over 66.4 million inscriptions, indicating that market participants have been busy on the Bitcoin network.

On the other hand, Runes was launched on Bitcoin’s halving day, particularly on the halving block. The protocol expands Bitcoin’s functionality by allowing the creation of fungible tokens, as Ethereum does. During the halving weekend, Runes transactions accounted for more than 50% of the total Bitcoin transactions, surpassing Ordinals and dominating the network.

In addition, the launch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF) in the United States and Hong Kong has also contributed to the spike in Bitcoin transactions. The Bitcoin ETF market currently has a market cap of $53.41 billion and assets under management totaling $52.68 billion.

Not the First

While it took Bitcoin around 15 years to process one billion transactions, the network’s count is likely to hit two billion in a shorter time frame as BTC gains more adoption and users flock to the blockchain.

It is worth noting that Bitcoin is not the first blockchain to hit 1,000,000,000 transactions. Ethereum did so a few years ago and has processed over 2.4 billion transactions since its launch in 2015.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s one billion transaction count does not include those executed on the network’s layer-2 protocol Lightning Network, launched in 2018.